"The rustic and gritty, painterly, tone was the staple for Sunflower Soup’s production design. “Cabin-core” is what I learned some called the aesthetic style years after the film was made. Having googled it, I guess I agree, sort of lol.

 

I did a lot of prep before buying any furniture or material for the set. I spent a ton of free time just googling images of cabins, rustic decor, and even looking up music to put into a playlist that fit with the visual tone of the script. My visual design folder was filled with props ideas, color schemes, lighting ideas, and paintings by Andrew Wyeth that Luis [capstone professor] actually shared with me when he seemed to understand what I was going for. Turned out to be kinda uncanny to how well the paintings represented the feel of the film, and they helped immensely.

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After a massive collection of jpegs, I started off with looking for local furniture for sale off places like Facebook Market place, the Offer Up app, and over a summer, managed to find every piece of furniture I needed for the set for under $100 a piece.

The plan was simple in my head. Blueprints that I drew and mocked up on paper and in Sims 4 were my reference to how the set would work to scale. I had a room in my parents’ house that was just big enough to build around a 200 square foot room in with some slack left for lighting. And this was all after deciding there was no real life cabin location out in the world I’d be able to find that could match up to the image I was looking for. I had a vision and became stubborn about it.

 

The shopping list besides pretty prop furniture started to grow: 8’x4’ plywood, 2x4s, clamps, 12 of those wood pallets you see on the side of grocery stores, rustic feely wallpaper, paint stripper, wood stain, and baby powder.

 

Baby powder will make sense later.

 

From March through July, I paint- stripped, re-stained, and polished furniture as I came across it, and contacted a pallet company in Salinas just off a highway. Somehow they were just super cool about the idea of me taking 12 of their pallets for free and crowbarring the heck out of them to lay them out to resemble a really shitty floor board. But, hey, that’s what I was going for. So I did that. Pictures below."

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[PHOTOS COMING SOON]

 

 

 

 

 

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"Floorboards now aside, I needed walls. Eleven 8 foot tall plywood stage flats. The ones they use intheatre like Broadway and stuff. YouTube tutorials were my best friend for the next couple weeks here. I cut out a janky doorway in one of them and two windows in two of them. This way I could point a fake sunlight through them and fake the lighting of a dreary sunrise coming over the wheat fields this cabin was supposed to be in. Even if we were still just on the second floor of my parents’ house.

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Flats now done. Floorboards now done. Furniture now done. Now came the time to compile them all together.

 

First we brought the floorboards in. That was by far the hardest part. I’d reassembled the pallets outside in my backyard first and made it so I’d have to puzzle-piece each pallet together after bringing them upstairs one by one. Pallets are heavy. But it worked out.

 

Next the stage flats. 11 stage flats surrounding the floorboards (fourth wall absent like a sitcom’s live studio). Suddenly the fake room started to actually look like a room. This is where that extra space came in behind each wall where I could plant some lighting through the windows and be able to freely walk around the set.

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Now with summer over, I had the chance to bring in some crew to help wallpaper and furnish the fake room. We brought in props and blankets and rugs, a little bed, some sunflower vases and the good ol’ dinner table and it’s decorations.

 

In the end it looked so nice. Too nice. Very clean. It needed to be a dirty, unkempt, *dusty* old cabin.

 

So, of course, we covered the place in baby powder.

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Before we knew it, we had a tiny cabin in my house.

 

And that’s the sort of rushed version of the story behind how we managed to be insane enough to get as far as we did with this film. If there’s any other questions you have for me about the set that maybe I didn’t cover, please let me know! I’d be happy to go more in- depth on particular features of the set or the thoughts that went behind it."

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-Director's Statement, 2019

TO BE UPDATED

 

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2023 Statement Coming Soon